3 Ways to Drive More Sales From Cart Abandonment

In our Email FAQs series, we answer your email marketing questions! In this episode, Daniel Kohn, the Founder of SmartMail, answers this email marketing question he gets asked all the time by online retailers: How can I drive even more sales from my cart abandonment campaign?

You’ve set up your cart abandonment campaigns and they’re converting more shoppers, but how can you take your campaign to the next level for that real bump in sales?

Watch the video below to find out! You can also read the full article or listen to the audio at the bottom of the post.

Hi there. Welcome back to another episode of eCommerce, email, FAQs. My name is Daniel Kohn. And today we’re gonna be talking all about shopping cart abandonment and how to get more value and drive more sales out of your cart abandonment campaign.

So a lot of you watching this are probably already running a shopping cart abandonment campaign. It’s very common practice, it’s usually…these campaigns run when someone adds an item to their cart, didn’t complete their order.

Obviously, they’ve shown a lot of purchase intent and they’re in what we call the final mile and you wanna close those sales, right?

So here are a couple of tips and a couple of ideas you could take to implement, to improve the performance of your cart abandonment campaigns.

Segment Campaigns by Basket Value

The first thing is to start looking at segmenting your campaigns based on basket value.

So, for example, if somebody’s basket value is over $100, you might wanna offer them an incentive. If someone’s basket value is under $100, you might not wanna offer them anything because the margin on those products might be a lot lower. And so you don’t wanna lose your pants on offering incentives where they don’t make sense.

So one of the filters you can create, and depending on the tool that you’re using, if you’re working with us at SmartMail, we have all these filters that can allow you to do that so you can send messages based on basket value.

What I normally suggest to companies is they look at their Google analytics, they try to figure out what their average order value is.

And usually, you wanna offer some sort of incentive above the average order value. And what that does is that it encourages people who are really close to buying to buy a little bit more, usually, over the average order value and then they can get the discount. So they actually have to do something more to claim that discount and at the same time, you don’t actually lose out by discounting as well.

Discounting by basket value is usually a really good way to segment out your cart abandoners and to reward people with higher baskets.

Now, you might wanna create three or four, probably four is probably a lot, but maybe two or three cascades. So maybe a really, really high cascade, a medium cascade, and then like a no incentive at all and be able to change your messaging and change your communication with these people based on what their basket value is. So that’s the first way and we’ve seen that work really well with the clients that we work with.

Segment Campaigns by Category and Product

Another way is to base it on what is actually in your shopping cart. So if there’s a certain product from a specific product category and you know you can discount on that particular category, you might wanna offer a discount if the product is from category X or if the product is, you know, sunglasses.

Anyone that’s got sunglasses in their cart, offer them 10% off. So you might wanna discount on that level because you know that in some categories or some brands, you might have more leeway to offer more margins. And we’ve seen that work really well across the board as well.

So that’s another way of trying to get more value out of segmenting your cart abandoners and offering different messages and different incentives based on, you know, what products they’ve actually put in their cart.

Create a Sense of Urgency

And then the third way that we like to help companies that we work with improve the performance of their cart abandonment campaign is by creating some sort of urgency around any incentives that you offer.

So what I mean by that is if you can not offer something of value like 10% off, if you complete your order, what you wanna do is make that 10% off only valid for 48 hours. And so what that does is it gives you a reason to tell them about that now and then to send them another email the next day and follow up with them the next day and say, “Hey, today is the last day.”

So you’ve got a 48-hour incentive and then 24 hours later, you’ve got one final e-mail that like says you know, like in the subject line, “Today is the last day.” And the headline of that e-mail says, “Today is the last day.” And what you try to do is create urgency to make them feel like they really need to come back and complete that order.

And what we found is as opposed to just having three emails in a sequence and not offering any incentive, when we offer an incentive in a sequence like that and the second and third email, it doesn’t really matter…well, it does matter a little bit when like half hour apart you send those second two emails, you don’t send them a week later.

I think the latest you wanna send them is maybe 72 to, you know, three to four days after. But you wanna keep it as a two-email sequence where it’s time sensitive and you’re mentioning the urgency in the subject line and in the headline of the actual e-mail itself. And so when you create that urgency around the incentive, you’re also gonna sell and close more sales that way as well.

So there’s three really good ideas if you’re running cart abandonment campaigns and you’re looking to try to figure out how to drive more value out of your campaigns. Try those three things and if your email platforms that you’re working with don’t actually provide you the ability to do that, get in touch with us, happy to help. And thanks for watching this video.